Education

Introduction
This chapter focuses on the relationship between education, wider social institutions such as
the family and workplace, and the individual. These are examined in terms of ‘outside school’
processes, such as how education relates to economic change and social mobility, and ‘inside
school’ processes, including ideas about the nature of the formal and hidden curriculum, the
effects of school segregation through streaming, setting and banding, and the development of
pro- and anti-student subcultures. These two themes are brought together through a discussion
of different levels of academic achievement that examines ideas about intelligence, language
and the significance of economic, social and cultural capital.
Theories about the role of education
The relationship between formal education systems and the economy is complex with many
dimensions. This is partly because the structure and organisation of education always reflects
ideological beliefs about its meaning, purpose and relationship to other social institutions. This
complexity is also due to the way in which economic systems of production, distribution and
exchange have developed historically.
Mass education, where the majority of a population experience formal schooling, is a feature
of most modern industrial societies. The relationship between mass education and economic
development is not accidental. In pre-industrial societies, when most people lived and worked
in and around the home, there was no economic need for education. Children of the ruling elite
might have received some education from tutors, but there was not usually a system of schools
as we recognise them today. It was only when industrialisation and factory production
increased the demand for a literate and numerate workforce that the pressure for mass education
arose.
Education systems are closely linked to economic systems in this way, but the precise nature
of their relationship is open to debate. We can explore this debate by looking at sociological
approaches to the relationship between education and work in contemporary industrial
societies.
Functionalist views about how education contributes to value consensus and social
solidarity
Functionalists see society as a social system consisting of different institutions (family, work,
education and so on). These institutions are functionally connected in two ways:
1. Each institution performs certain essential (core) functions, such as providing the means
of survival (work) or secondary socialisation (education).
2. To perform these functions, each institution needs certain things from other institutions.
In contemporary societies, where the workplace usually requires a certain level of
knowledge and skill, the education system needs to provide individuals with the
necessary social and intellectual abilities. Schools perform this function by approving
(accrediting) certain levels of knowledge and skill through qualifications.
The relationship between education and work is one of dependency. The workplace needs the
education system to perform its allotted roles in order for society to function successfully.
The development of mass education is, therefore, explained in terms of functional
differentiation: institutions develop to perform particular functions, such as ‘work’ and
‘education’. If the needs of one institution are not being adequately met, tensions develop
within the system that threaten its stability and ability to function. For example, industrial forms
of work require a literate and numerate workforce; without these skills, the economy cannot
function. Institutions such as the family cannot meet this new requirement, so the stability of
the system is threatened. It can be restored in one of two ways:
1. An existing institution, such as the family or religion, evolves to perform the required
function. This involves differentiation that occurs within individual institutions.
Different roles need to be developed if the institution is to perform its new function.

2. A new institution, such as formal education, arises to fulfil the need.

Although it is possible for an existing institution to evolve, the scale of economic change that
occurs as societies industrialise is often too great. Existing institutions cannot adapt quickly
enough or in all the necessary ways to deal with the new demands. At some point in their
development, therefore, all societies will develop a specialised set of institutions (education)
that can restore stability in such situations.
Institutions such as schools also act as agents of secondary socialisation. Individuals take on
(internalise) the norms and values of society. This is sometimes done openly (explicitly), for
example through lessons or moral messages in assemblies, or may be more unspoken (implicit),
such as through the ways teachers and students interact with each other. Often there is a focus
on getting individuals to share an identity as citizens of a nation state or followers of a religion.
Feelings of citizenship can be encouraged by, for example, singing a national anthem or having
a national flag or other symbol displayed. The outcome is that individuals share a level of
agreement, so that there is value consensus and a sense of shared identity. This contributes to
social solidarity because it reduces conflict between individuals and groups. Individuals tend
to accept their given (allocated) position in society and so do not have a complaint that may
lead to conflict. If they are in a low work position, they will accept this as fair, because they
did not have the ability or make the effort to do better.
Education and role allocation
In the UK, the 1944 Education Act that established free, universal education explicitly
addressed the relationship between education and the workplace through a difference
(distinction) between:
 academic students, destined to move on to university and professional employment

 vocational (employment-related) students, destined to follow a practical or technical

route into the workforce.

Secondary (ages 11–15) education was organised into a three-type (tripartite) system. Students
were allocated to one of three types of school after taking an intelligence test at age 11. The
types of school not only followed contemporary beliefs about the nature of intelligence, they
also reflected current economic needs in terms of types of labour:
  Grammar schools provided a wholly academic education and were aimed at the needs
of professional occupations, such as doctors and accountants, based on particular
qualifications.

 Secondary modern schools provided a mix of vocational and academic education

aimed at the needs of the service sector.

 Secondary technical schools provided a work-related technical/vocational education

and were aimed at the development of skilled manual occupations. In fact, this section
was never fully established and its function was largely taken over by secondary
modern schools.
The argument that this type of division is functional and necessary is reflected in secondary
education systems worldwide:
 India has both academic and vocational (school and profession-based) routes through
secondary education.

 Pakistan has similarly developed academic and technical routes.

 Mauritius organises secondary education in a slightly different way, but has also
developed a distinction between academic routes into the workplace and a form of basic
education intended to be a route into vocational training, for around 5% of the school
population.
The separation of academic and vocational educational routes reflects a belief in two basic
forms of work:
1. Professional careers, requiring higher levels of deep, abstract knowledge and lower
levels of practical expertise.

2. Non-professional work, requiring higher levels of practical expertise and lower levels
of abstract knowledge.
These ideas are reflected in Davis and Moore’s (1945) argument that those who are most able
and talented intellectually are allocated work roles that offer the highest rewards in terms of
income, power and status. In other words, the most functionally important economic roles must
be filled by the most capable members of society. There is a clear relationship between
education and the economy. The education system ‘sifts and sorts’ individuals according to
their intelligence and ability and allocates them to appropriate schools or courses. The
individuals then obtain (acquire) the skills or qualifications that enable them to take up
particular work roles. This suits both individuals and society at the same time. Individuals get
work for which they are suited and there are the right number of individuals with the right skills
and qualifications for all the work that needs to be done. The education system can be used to
address any balance problems that arise, for example if more engineers are needed, more
courses can be created and more appropriate skills taught in schools.
Criticisms of functionalism
Part of the functionalist view is that work roles have different levels of functional importance
depending on their contribution to society. For example, a functionalist would say that
accountants have higher social status and pay than road sweepers because their role is
functionally more important for society.
Tumin (1953), however, questioned the idea that we can objectively measure functional
importance. He argued that this is something we can only establish subjectively and that it
represents an ideological justification for the functionalist analysis of education and its
relationship to the economy. Such arguments are based on a circular or tautological argument
(one that contains its own proof). Accountancy has greater functional importance because it
requires high-level academic qualifications – the demand for advanced academic qualifications
are proof that this occupation is functionally important to the economy.
A second line of criticism of functionalism is that there is little evidence that a genuinely
ability-based (meritocratic) system exists in modern industrial societies. These societies are
marked by inequality, which affects who is able to succeed in the education system. For
example, wealthy people can send their children to fee-paying schools, which effectively buys
them social status rather than children earning it through their own talents. The idea of
meritocracy has been criticised by both interactionists, who focus on school processes to show
that education is not meritocratic, and Marxists, who argue that the ‘meritocracy myth’ hides
underlying processes of class reproduction.
Marxist views about how education contributes to the maintenance of the capitalist
economic system
Bowles and Gintis (2002) argue that the structure and organisation of the workplace is copied
in the organisation of schools. Workplace inequalities are reflected and reproduced through the
education system in ways:
 The school disciplines students to the demands of work and the ‘crucial ingredient of
job adequacy’. This involves behaviour such as regular attendance and the control of
personal time and space – where students should be and when they should be there.

 Social relationships within the school copy the relationships found at work. There is,
for example, a structure within the school similar to that in the workplace, with teachers
exercising authority over students.

 Just as workers have no control over or ownership of the things they produce, so too
are students without control in the education system. They have no control over:

 the educational process as a whole: they must simply do as they are told\

 the content of education: this is decided by others

  the teaching and learning process: students are encouraged to compete against each
other for grades and qualifications rather than see knowledge and understanding as
goals in their own right.

For Bowles and Gintis, the correspondence principle is maintained at all levels of the education
system, usually through streaming, setting or banding (see below):
 For those destined for lower levels of work, ‘rule following’ is emphasised; students
are given little responsibility and made to do simple, repetitive tasks.
 For those destined for middle levels of work, reliability and some ability to work
independently is emphasised.
 For those destined for higher levels of work, there is an emphasis on working
independently and taking some control over their academic work.
Education as an instrument of ideological control and cultural reproduction
The relationship between education and the economy, therefore, is based around cultural
reproduction – the means through which higher social classes reproduce their economic
domination from generation to generation.
For Bourdieu (1986), meritocracy is a myth. The education system works in favour of a ruling
elite in various ways. Some involve the ability to pay for exclusive forms of education such as
private schooling and tutoring, while others relate to educational practices such as streaming,
where children of different abilities are taught separately. Meritocracy is, however, a justifying
(legitimating) myth for Bourdieu; the education system has the appearance of fairness, equality
and merit, legitimising the way things are, when in fact it is the opposite, unfair, unequal, and
without merit.
The formal curriculum plays an important part in cultural reproduction because it allows
children of different classes to be separated into different employment streams at an early age.
In this way, cultural reproduction is disguised as a consequence of the choices children make
and their differing levels of ability or aptitude. For Althusser (1971), schools are an ideological
state apparatus (ISA) that involves social learning. Teachers ‘transform pupil consciousness’
by encouraging them to accept not just ‘the realities of life’, that the workplace is unequal, but
also their likely future social positions. In this respect, vocational education within schools has
two main advantages for ruling elites:
1. It eliminates working-class children as competitors for higher-level occupations.
2. It gives the appearance of being chosen by the working class, either through choice or
because they have failed to reach a required level of academic achievement.
How do teachers ‘transform pupil consciousness’?
Bates and Riseborough (1993), for example, argued that a significant feature of contemporary
forms of vocational education in the UK (sometimes called the new vocationalism) is that most
(white) middle-class students follow the academic route into professional employment, while
(white and black) working-class students are encouraged along the vocational route to lower-
paid/lower-status work.
Marxists have generally been critical of both vocational education and work-based training
schemes. For Bates and Riseborough, the new vocationalism is about social control. It takes
potentially difficult unemployed youth ‘off the streets’ and subjects them to workplace
discipline, lowers wages for all young people by funding (subsidising) some employers, and
lowers unemployment figures. As Davies (2012) reports, such schemes have been accused of
being ‘modern slave labour’ that involves little or no training.
Several criticisms have been made of Marxist views about how education contributes to the
maintenance of the capitalist economic system. Young (1981), for example, has called this
approach ‘left functionalism’: the idea that education functions to ‘meet the needs of a ruling
class’. Marxists have also been criticised for seeing working-class students as passive and for
making the assumption that everything that is taught in schools is necessarily learnt. Willis’s
(1977) study of working-class students in the UK showed that they were not passive – they
strongly resisted attempts by teachers to make them conform to school rules and values.
Heath (1997) argued that Marxist approaches tend to reject all forms of vocational education
because they encourage class-based cultural reproduction. She notes that, by demanding equal
opportunities, some forms of vocational education have helped women in areas of schooling
and eventually work that were traditionally male areas.
New Right views on the relationship between education and the economy
New Right perspectives acknowledge the basic relationship outlined by writers such as Davis
and Moore. However, they also argue that this kind of society and economy no longer exists.
The rapid social and economic changes that have occurred over the past 40 years as a result of
globalisation have changed our understanding of the relationship between education and the
economy. There has been a steady rise in general service industries and, more recently, a rapid
rise in computer-based service technologies. In post-industrial society, therefore, services and
knowledge are the dominant productive industries, and these are known for (characterised by)
their flexibility and speed of change. This brings into question the distinction between the
academic and the vocational in modern education systems. The New Right argue that this type
of division is too inflexible to meet the needs of a globalised economy. Economic behaviour in
the 21st century is very different from 50 – let alone 150 – years ago. Various globalising
processes have caused a long-term decline in manufacturing and a rise in the financial and
service sectors. This has changed both the nature of economic production and, as a
consequence, the nature of education systems needs to change too.
In many education systems, these ideas are reflected in recent changes to different types of
academic and vocational qualifications, with various attempts to:
 break down rigid distinctions between ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ subjects through the
development of new qualifications and routes to ability (competence)
 move away from a curriculum wholly focused on subject knowledge towards one based
on functional knowledge and skills, such as the ability to work with others and solve
problems rather than simply ‘remember names and dates’
 narrow the distinction between different types of knowledge and skills.
Social democratic views on the relationship between education and the economy
Social democratic theory looks at the relationship between education and the economy in terms
of two related processes in modern societies:
1. Technological changes in the workplace, involving both a decline in traditional
manufacturing and the rise of service industries in areas such as finance, computing and
information technology. In the UK, for example, the tripartite system produced a small
percentage of highly qualified university entrants (around 15% of 18-year-olds) and a
large number of poorly qualified school-leavers. This situation failed to meet the
economic need for a better-qualified service-industry workforce.
2. Social changes focused on ideas about equality in gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class.
The tripartite system failed to meet the requirements of social fairness because it was
based on ideas about intelligence that were increasingly divided along class lines.
The solution to these problems in the UK was comprehensive education, which was designed
to address social inequality and technological change. Social democrats believe that
comprehensive schools fulfil the ideal of a meritocracy. These schools contain a broad class
mix, in which all children – regardless of earlier academic achievement – receive the same
secondary education. In the UK, the introduction of comprehensive schools was intended to
establish a system of equality of opportunity. This was not only seen as socially fair, but in
addition, competition would produce larger numbers of better-qualified workers to serve the
new technological requirements of a changing economy. From this perspective, therefore,
education is the means through which problems of technological change and social inequality
can be addressed and managed. A truly meritocratic system would result in a fairer distribution
of economic and social rewards, increased social mobility and a decline in social inequality.
More recently, social democratic theory has argued for the need to retrain and refocus the
workforce in contemporary societies to address both economic and social changes. As Chitty
(2009) notes, this involves seeing ‘education and training’ as the means through which
industrial societies are ‘transformed from low-skill, low-wage economies into a high-skill,
high-wage and technologically advanced economies’.